Stranger than Fiction

For the category Popular Science of the 2022 NONFICTION READER CHALLENGE , I chose The Big Necessity: Adventures in the World of Human Waste, by Rose George, 2008. The book focuses on practices of sanitation (i.e., toilets) in the world (or lack of them) and why this impacts everyone on the planet, as well as the planet itself. This seems like an unusual topic (one of the reasons it interested me), but also one that’s important yet rarely talked about. George refers to this many times throughout the book (“… we refuse to notice that we still don’t know how to properly deal with something that we all produce, up to several times a day, many million years after we first started producing it.”). However, some of the data she presents indicates why this should change. Lack of sanitation – or poor sanitation – affects almost everything about our lives, even if we live in a society that has effective sanitation. She starts with the statistic that 2.6 billion people don’t have sanitat...

For the category Economics of the 2022 NONFICTION READER CHALLENGE , I chose Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, by Caroline Criado Perez, 2019. Some things I already knew: women earn less than men for the same work; women do more unpaid work than men; women have fewer public toilet facilities, and medical studies generally use only men or more men than women, so are not necessarily relevant for women’s health (for example, heart attack symptoms). But there was so much more that I hadn’t realized – so much that the information became rather depressing. For example, I hadn’t realized to what extent the design of public spaces (streets, bus stops, public transportation routes, …) is based on data from and about men. As Criado Perez writes at the end of the section with chapters relating to different types of public spaces: “These are not niche concerns, and if public spaces are truly to be for everyone, we have to start accounting for the lives of ...